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Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules

OMG has Become an ISO “Liaison A” Member to TC 37 and OMG has adopted a specification, "Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules" (SBVR) that is based on the ISO TC 37 terminology standards (see: http://www.omg.org/cgibin/doc?dtc/2006-03-02). Three key additions, among several others, to the ISO TC 37 standards on which it is based are the:

1. Underpinning of ISO 1087-1 with formal logic based on the upcoming ISO Common Logic standard.

2. Ability to structure the wording/meaning of definitions in formal logic based on the terms and concept relations in a terminology/vocabulary.

3. Ability to structure the wording/meaning of policy and rule statements in formal logic based on the terms and concept relations in a terminology/vocabulary.

Donald Chapin, Chair of OMG’s Finalization Task Force for the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules specification, will handle primary responsibility for the OMG – ISO TC37 liaison. The Liaison Subcommittee of the OMG Board of Directors is responsible for approving and managing all Liaisons that OMG has with Standards Development Organizations and Industry Consortia. The Subcommittee will, as appropriate, act to provide formal backing for each ISO TC 37 document in which OMG is interested.

What OMG Brings to the TableThe OMG will play a major role in broadening the community for terminology and adding several new areas of reuse of terminology in organizations (such as governance & regulatory compliance, policies, semantics based categorization and retrieval of text documents, business intelligence and data semantics). This has the potential for significantly improving the value proposition for investing in terminologies. The experience of OMG member organizations in applying terminologies in these areas will provide practical input to the on-going ISO TC 37 standards work. The mapping of SBVR to the OMG’s Ontology Definition Metamodel for the Semantic Web will make SBVR a people-centered bridge between terminology and ontologies and their reasoning engines.